Colin Marshall

50 ready-made media angles on The Marketplace of Ideas

I know for a fact some of you readers and listeners wield awesome media power. I also suspect you, like me, have a strong interest in bringing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation to and hearing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation on the radio. So why not use that awesome media power to promote The Marketplace of Ideas, thus bringing us all one step closer to a much more interesting world to listen to?

For your convenience, I have come up with 50 ready-made headlines, each with its own “angle” for use in your publication, program, pamphlet, blog, or screed. Should you choose to use one, I will make myself available to provide all necessary quotes, sound bites, photo appearances, etc.

1. 26-Year-Old Public Radio Interviewer “Throws Down the Gauntlet” To All Public Radio Interviewers Over 26
2. In Wasteland Of Radio, Actual Interestingness (NYT edition)
3. Southern California Public Radio Personality Interviews 150 Luminaries At Length, All Without Ever Owning Garbage Disposal
4. Area Public Radio Broadcaster “Mad As Hell” And “Not Going To Take It Anymore”
5. Young Achievers: Colin Marshall, Microphone-Talker
6. A Rising Public Radio Star’s Quixotic Mission To Perceptibly Rise To Public Radio’s Equivalent Of Stardom
7. Host-Producer of “Most Fascinating Show on Radio” Eats Peanut Butter Sandwiches Every Single Day
8. A Newish Thing For Radio: Actual Conversation
9. Delusional Young Man Makes Content
10. Devil-May-Care Radio Interviewer Does Not Edit Out 80 Percent Of Conversations
11. He Does Radio And Office Nihilism
12. Public Radio Maverick Produces Program On “Non-Insane” Budget
13. Santa Barbara Man Has Nonsensically Interviewed Michael Silverblatt, Tyler Cowen, Momus, Steve Wozniak, And Charles Murray All On One Show
14. “He Seemed To Have Read My Book,” Claim Shocked Authors Interviewed By Marginal Public Radio Personality
15. Local Man Regularly Speaks To Own Heroes at Length, Cannot Afford Hamster
16. “Why Is This My Life,” Says Radio Host, 26
17. Marketplace of Ideas Broadcaster Declares Fatwa On Four-Minute “Nothing” Interviews
18. In Act Of Raw Impudence, Radio Interviewer Publicly Desires Career
19. “I Bring Up Abbas Kiarostami Almost Every Week”: An Interviewer On The Rise Talks Techniques
20. A Man, A Plan, An Ear Canal: The Marketplace of Ideas
21. “Be About Something”: A Fledgling Show’s Controversial Manifesto
22. Young Host Pledges To Create Richest Richest Interview Program in Existence — But Can He Do it Without Temping?
23. Starkly Experimental Radio Program Discusses Only “Interesting” Books, Films, Music
24. Public Radio Meany Refused to Promote Ephemeral Trend Piece-Turned-Book, Claims Aggrieved Publicist
25. The Marketplace Of Ideas’ Battle To Become A Known Entity: Impossible Or Highly Improbable?
26. Point: Radio Needs More Thoughtful Long-Form Conversations; Counterpoint: Isn’t A Stream Of Jittery Nonsense Enough?
27. Santa Barbara Public Radio Interviewer Attains Positive Net Worth (purely speculative)
28. Discovering Own Unemployability, California Radio Personality Left Only One Choice: Creating Worthwhile Things
29. Meet Colin Marshall: Public Radio Host By Night, Nihilistic, Motionless Desk-Sitter By Day
30. Versatile Radio Host-Producer Interviews Authors, Musicians, Filmmakers, Bloggers, Scholars — Pretty Much Everyone Except Entrepreneurs, Who Keep Being Dicks About Scheduling
31. Scandalous Radio Program Discusses People and Things You Haven’t Heard of Yet
32. “Kept to Himself, Mostly,” Say Neighbors of Apocalyptically Frustrated Public Radio Gunman
33. “Intellectually Engaged” Public Radio Interviewer Holds “Question Sheet Bonfire” in Town Square
34. Santa Barbara Program Contains Fewer Than 15 Resets Per Hour; “Insane,” Says Mainstream Public Radio Representative
35. Bitter Drought of Broadcast Conversations About Robert Walser, David Hume, and Kobo Abe Reaches Merciful End
36. Brazen Radio Host Programs For “Attentive” Audience
37. “He Does Interviews Designed To Be Relevant Even Next Week?” Ask Bewildered Public Radio Bigshots
38. Santa Barbara Public Radio Host Announces Goal Of 10,000 Listeners; Listener Count Drops Vertiginously
39. Public Radio Establishment On Up-and-Coming Interviewer Who Talks Only To Guests He Wants To: “You Can’t Do That”
40. Destitute Public Radio Professional Charged In Social Security Scam; “What Choice Did I Have?” Cries Disgraced Host
41. Literary Modernism, Experimental Film, Wang Chung: Do These Topics Belong On Our Radios? (op-ed)
42. Shamefully Unprofessional Interviewer Refuses To Write Rigid, Uncomprehending Questions Beforehand
43. Headless Public Radio Host Found in Topless Bar
44. “I Want To Make A Halfway Respectable Show,” Says Hopeless Radio Host-Producer
45. 26-Year-Old Interviewer The Future of Public Radio, Such As It Has One
46. Even In State Of Extreme Despondency, Heroic Public Radio Host Manages To Interview Prominent Literary Translators
47. Freakish Public Radio Program Wholly Ignores Politics, Racism, Youthful Weltschmerz, And Ambient Sounds of The Barrio
48. Embittered Public Radio Host Renounces World, Begins Broadcasting Exclusively To Own Shack
49. “I Don’t Mind A Small Audience, As Long As It’s Smart,” Says Quietly Weeping Radio Interviewer
50. Respected Radio Interviewer Reveals Interviewing Secret: “Actually Be Interested”

R.J. Cutler: The September Issue

Wait, Anna Wintour just gets up and does a thing she’s good at or things associated with what she’s good at all day? You mean to tell me she doesn’t have to temp for eight hours, editing Vogue in stolen moments of downtime? Oh, I see; she’s figured out some sort of rolling welfare scam, right? I bet she tells Uncle Sam she’s got nine kids and lives off the sweet nectar of the dole, free to exercise her real skills all day long. God, that must be sweet.

So in the final stages of my descent into the vortex of nihilism, I find it difficult to watch documentaries like these. The September Issue shows nothing but people engaged in work at which they excel, slowly but inexorably revealing that they really do it all day long. While I have no particular opinions on women’s fashion or the magazines that cover it, watching people work hard and well while clearly getting paid for it — and probably having their proficiency positively effect their quality of life — in any setting tortures me. Over time, I’ve whittled my wish list down to one compound item: to be able to work hard at what I’m good at, to only do that, and to have my accomplishments therein translate into something. Anything. Having gotten nowhere near that, I watch a movie like this, filled with professionals living lives unified with their crafts, the way a hungry hobo might watch a film of a Christmas ham.

Of course, it could be worse; I could want to make fashion magazines. I don’t know about the rest of Gen Y, but seeing anybody do well at something I’d like to do well at floods me with fear that the door closed behind them. Writers? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore. Filmmakers? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore. Broadcasters? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore. Editors of Vogue? Hoo boy. You’d better forget that. Feel free to do all that stuff on the side while, for a paycheck, you either suffocate in alienated Kafka-hood or ask people if they want that macchiato extra wet. You can only live a unified life as an app developer of an SEO consultant.

In conclusion, I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The moments in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives which remain vividly in my mind nearly two weeks after seeing the film:

A lone water buffalo, in almost-silhouette, crosses the frame in murky late-afternoon darkness. I read that Uncle Boonmee actually comes as the culmination of a long-term series of Apichatpong-made artworks called Primitive. I briefly feared a Southland Tales-type situation where my ignorance of all the universe-establishing graphic novels, action figures, and webisodes that came before renders the film unwatchable, but then remembered I had nothing to worry about. Apichatpong builds his films viscerally, hence their strong performance among audiences in rural-by-rural-standards parts of Thailand who’ve never seen movies of any kind before. If he ever releases a picture that requires the viewer to know anything going in — anything at all — he will have done it wrong.

Eventually, a man in a loincloth turns up to wrangle the stray buffalo back to its herd. Watching this transpire, I thought, “Yes, primitive. Certainly.”

After a cut, the camera stares at a stock-still apelike creature, totally in silhouette except for its two red-L.E.D. eyes, which stare back. These creatures feature prominently in Uncle Boonmee’s promotional materials, especially in its North American poster, drawn by Chris Ware, which I can’t stop looking at. (The Cannes poster, which the video artist Blake Williams sent me rolled up in a mailing tube, also fills me with delight.) Apichatpong talks in interviews about the homage this character design pays to the beloved cheap Thai television shows and low-rent VHS movies of his childhood, which kept their monsters in the dark so you couldn’t see the shoddiness of the costumes but made their eyes glow so you could still tell where they were. Most of my favorite films strike just this balance: preposterous and funny, but somehow still of the highest seriousness.

A ghost very, very gradually fades into opacity at the dinner table. In the final days before the titular Uncle Boonmee, the film’s main character, succumbs to some sort of kidney disorder, his dead wife Huay briefly rejoins the living. During an early outdoor dinner scene — a sensory overload due to its cricket-rich sound design along — Huay appears in an empty spot at the table, but she does it so gradually that you don’t even notice until her materialization has just about finished.

I think Huay comes out of 20-odd years of death primarily to assist Boonmee in his own exit from life. (Eventually, she takes this matter directly into her ghost-hands by fatally unscrewing the plastic apparatus surgically attached to his insides.) Boonmee and his sister-in-law, Huay’s sister, show a little surprise at Huay’s having turned up, but quickly turn matter-of-fact: yes, a dead wife returning to help out around the house is definitely something that happens. Here we have another quality of Apichatpong’s films that keeps me coming back: even when he unleashes the weirdness, he faces it practically, head-on. “Heaven is overrated,” Huay reports. “There’s nothing there!”

A princess stares at her own reflection in the water, which at first looks classically “beautiful” but then fades back into her real face, which looks not exactly “ugly” but somehow somehow exists off of the known axes of beauty and ugliness. This comes right at the beginning of the scene from Uncle Boonmee everybody talks about, the one with cunnilingus administered by a magical catfish. In prelude to that, the magical catfish creates the idealized reflection for her. But I remember that less than I do the genuine reflection that returns to disappoint the princess, because it looks so different than this fairy-tale setup would have led me to expect. She doesn’t have a hook nose and warts of whatever; she doesn’t turn out to be ugly-ugly or even homely, exactly; she just looks — oddly leonine, I guess? Apichatpong shows the face so briefly that you can’t get much of a read on it, which had to have been the idea.

A monk stands up from a hotel bed to head out on the town, but immediately looks back and sees himself still sitting on the bed, watching television. I consider this Uncle Boonmee’s cinematic high point, the equivalent of the steam-pipe finale in its Apichat-predecessor, Syndromes and a Century. Unlike the steam pipe, the monk seeing himself still sitting on the bed from which he just rose isn’t the greatest moment of 21st-century cinema so far, but it doesn’t trail far behind. Talking to Charlie Rose in 1997, David Foster Wallace cited his artistic turning point in a moment from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when, despite having been shot dead, the Yellow Man still stands upright. The monk starting to open the door and then looking back at himself may well turn out to be mine.

The monk and a middle-aged woman go out to a tacky, Christmas-light-strung, practically empty sort of restaurant and karaoke bar. They look at one another as a Thai pop song blasts, and then the movie ends. This just struck me as the perfect ending, somehow. All attempts to explain in words have proven futile; you’ll just have to watch to the movie. I’ve come to realize that untranslatability into language, which you might already have identified as Apichatpong’s strong suit, pulls me into a film more than perhaps any other quality. Even outside cinema, I find myself slightly weary of words and their limitations. Much more — alas, more words — on that later.

Richard Yates: The Easter Parade

“[The Easter Parade’s] the characters are all 'fucked',” wrote novelist and Richard Yates admirer/own-novel-titler-afterer Tao Lin. “The main character is the least 'fucked,' but the least 'fucked' person is always in a different way the most 'fucked' person, because of being most aware that everyone around him or her is 'fucked.’” Yates would seem to validate Lin’s assessment with the novel’s very first line: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”

A bold opening move, since it makes you envision a slog ahead: okay, so having established his characters’ ultimate unhappiness, he’ll just deterministically trace it from one probable cause all the way through the next fifty years. But that thing about the parental divorce now seems to me like a red herring: Emily and Sarah Grimes come from divorced parents, sure, but so many other hard-to-identify factors weight down on them that the search for one or even a few “main ones” can produce nothing. They “fuck” themselves, but their circumstances also do it, their parents also do it, their men also do it, humanity as a whole also does it, you and I probably also do it — but none do it intentionally, let alone maliciously.

Sarah, the older and more immediately pretty sister, rapidly settles down with a lowbrow semi-Englishman who beats her and produces three sons. Emily, the younger, relatively bookish sister to whom the narrative sticks closely, goes to college, signs on with an advertising agency, and bounces without prolonged satisfaction from man to man to man. Almost everyone around her eventually slips up and reveals themselves as a pathetic figure, then dies. Her father, a beaten-down copy desk drone working at a newspaper he hates, goes first. Her mother, a flighty alcoholic with rotting teeth and complex delusions of bon viveur-ism, takes much longer. Sarah, whom Yates paints as maybe too dumb to realize the grim, stunted banality of her family life, goes last.

This leaves Emily alone at the novel’s end, unemployed and flipping through her address book in desperation for human contact. Her former lovers, many of them cultural and financial medium- to medium-high rollers, have married or died. Only her favorite nephew Peter remains, and ringing him up strikes her as a near-ludicrous stretch. She does it anyway, which prompts him to invites her to stay with his new family in New Hampshire. But the moment she arrives, Emily drops into an obscure emotional turmoil, totally freaking out by the time she spots bicycles in Peter’s garage:

“So you bicycle!” she called to him across the top of the car. She had gotten out quickly, still trembling, and snatched her suitcase from the back seat; then, because a good loud sound was needed to punctuate her rage, she slammed the car door with all her strength. “That’s what you do. Oh, and what a lovely sight it must be, the two of you out bicycling with little what’s-her-name on a Sunday afternoon, all tanned and leggy in your sexy little cut-off jeans—you must be the envy of all New Hampshire...”

I have a sense that this scene, the novel’s last, exists to deliver the culmination of Emily’s rage at neither her nor anyone in her immediate family’s life having “panned out,” especially as compared to what she extrapolates from her scant data on Peter’s. But what would their panned-out lives have looked like? At no point do Emily, Sarah, nor their mother “Pookie” develop a clear idea of what they mean to achieve; they just sort of swim along like blind cave fishes. Yates writes that Pookie’s life “seemed pledged to achieving and sustaining an elusive quality she called ‘flair.’” Even with some idea of what she wanted, Yates seems to doubt that even the reasonably intelligent Emily could’ve gotten there: “Do you know a funny thing?” she says to Peter after she tires herself out with the hopeless j’accuse. “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

Does Yates use The Easter Parade to make some kind of feminist statement? You could easily close the book and think, “Women: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.” Sarah reaches deep dissatisfaction by way of marriage, family, and alcohol; Emily reaches deep dissatisfaction by way of a education, a career, and “liberated” serial monogamy. Yet Yates rolls out red carpet over which they still somehow walk the plank: Sarah’s looks let her write her own ticket with the menfolk, and Emily scores a plum job at an ad agency not only free of Mad Men-type discrimination but run by a woman. Not only does their femaleness not hold them back, but I have a hard time finding a way in which Yates doesn’t make it a great advantage.

All the way through, I kept thinking of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. To the extent that Yates’ Grimes sisters “fuck” themselves (in Tao Lin’s parlance), they do it by not doing anything in particular, by not acting with anything resembling decisiveness, just like Heller’s equally mid-century malaise-y Robert Slocum. Yet despite this, all three characters labor under strong, amorphous desires: Sarah Grimes for something maybe like marriage and family, Emily Grimes for something maybe like intellectuality and independence, and Robert Slocum for something maybe like comfort routine. In this way, Slocum mirrors Frank Wheeler of Yates’ own Revolutionary Road, whose wife April wants him to attain something maybe like a “creative” life in Paris. (Emily and one of her many men actually try this, but it works out as well as anything does for Richard Yates characters.)

I feel like Yates might have a certain formula in mind here: strong desire + lack of intention = a whole lot of not fun. This seems inherently wrong to say about a bearded, leathery, embittered, chain-smoking, non-college-educated World War II veteran bent on chronicling a certain strain of decadent American mediocrity, but I’ve come to think of him as a kind of Buddhist novelist. Maybe lower-case-b buddhist novelist, but still, his worldview attributes very few of humanity’s problems to outright malice, and I doubt his characters would have fared worse on the Eightfold Path.

In Our Timelessness

Twitten: How the New Science of Social Media Rewires our Cognitive Love Centers and Why it Matters Now More than Ever — to name one book I’d never talk about on The Marketplace of Ideas. I made that particular title up, but only trivial differences separate it from real ones. My mailbox endure a steady stream of unsolicited books like these, sent in hopes that I’ll interview their authors. I sell them, but not without regret: regret over the waste of postage, regret over disappointing a publicist, regret over encountering yet another unwanted reminder of human triviality.

This gets me thinking: why don’t I feature certain books on The Marketplace of Ideas? (You’d think I could sooner answer the question of why I do feature certain books on the show, but I hit the wall much quicker and harder on that one.) I’ve noticed patterns, in the form of words or phrases that move me to list the book on Half.com immediately. Besides the one-made-up-word title and the lengthy subtitle — flapping red flags both — the fictitious example above contains these strongly disrecommending words/phrases:

• “the New Science”
• “Social Media”
• “Cognitive”
• “Why it Matters”
• “Now”

While I obviously have nothing against science, “New Science” runs the risk of turning out not to be anything at all. The term “Social Media” gained currency in, like, 2005, so I fear a conversation about it will sound as ridiculous to listeners of 2045 as a conversation about lawn darts would sound to us. “Cognitive” doesn’t bother me in itself, but I think someone in publishing just found out that you shift more units with “Cognitive” or “Neuro” in the title, momentarily rendering the words little more than cheap polish. This rule has exceptions, but if you must announce that something “Matters”, then it probably doesn’t. As for “Now”... well, I don’t care about now.

This sounds like an extension of the rule about clothes inspired in part by William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard: the further into the past you could have worn an it, the further into the future you can wear it. (“She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.”) I can point to only one unifying principle of my aesthetics: timelessness. Or maybe non-timeliness. Or even less grandly, “chronological unclarity.” “Achronologicality,” maybe. Put even more simply, I like stuff where you can’t readily identify what time it comes from — clothes, sure, but also visual art, film, music, “design” — and I especially like it when you mix a bunch of that stuff together. Like anything in aesthetics, this attraction extends far, far beyond aesthetics — as far as, say, books and radio shows.

You know who else likes aesthetic achronologicality? Chaz Bundick, the founder of Toro y Moi, far and away my favorite musical project of the 21st century. We talked directly about this when I interviewed him on The Marketplace of Ideas. He, too, seems driven in music and elsewhere by a desire for achronologicality. Seems to have worked for him. I mean, just look at this shot-in-Super 8 music video!

Some people — radio people, specifically — might scoff at my ideal of recording interviews meant to stay good the day after they are, let alone to remain valuable decades and decades on. But in moments of doubt, I need only remember the league this potentially puts me in: Bookworm, Entitled Opinions, The Treatment, with some titular irony In Our Time — and, in another arena, Toro y Moi.

In conclusion:

Objectivism

Nobody really puts an “objective” on their résumé, do they? I understand that the how-to wisdom of the résumé ancients dictates that thou shalt put one at the top and, within, thou shalt describe thyself as an "accomplished administrator seeking to leverage extensive background in personnel management, recruitment, employee relations and benefits administration in an entry-level human resources position" or something even worse.

I can’t write three words of an objective before I double over in the pain of being the century’s greatest dorkus. So I’ve never included an objective, but then again, I’ve never succeeded, so I took the issue to the hive mind. Representative responses:

“Isn't that what a cover letter is for?”

“just as many people (who counsel resume writing/job searchers for a living) tell me that it omg-has-to-be-on-there as I've had tell me omg-don't-put-it-on-there”

“bear in mind that most resume style advice is being given by people who are not themselves looking for jobs, and who have no incentive to keep track of the effectiveness of the advice they give”

“Half the time people shoot themselves in the foot by stating objectives that do not align with the position in question.”

“I think the objective thing is one potential part of the overall package and if you sell yourself better without some contrived paragraph then do that instead.”

“So once upon a time, somebody who knew stuff found it was a good idea to put a descriptive sentence or two at the top of their resume to sorta prime the reader into thinking how everything below fits into it. As that bit of knowledge diffused through the stultifying filters of corporate idiocy, it transmogrified into the ‘Objective: to get you to hire me’ line.”

“If I saw an objective statement that really seemed to uniquely fit the role I was hiring for that would definitely get my attention, but it's never actually happened.”

“if the truth is, ‘I need a fucking paycheck. Why do you think I'm applying?’ maybe leave that out.”

“they only ever stand out when they suck so much that they singlehandedly eliminate the candidate from consideration”

“at best a little bit of harmless dorkiness, and at worst makes me think of the writer as some kind of toadying idiot”

“God I hate objectives.”

“It screams ‘I'm the sort of person who really, really, really loves to contribute to workshops on developing vision and mission statements we can all get behind, and on explaining the difference between a vision and a mission over and over and over again.’”

“It's the type of useless thing a campus career counselor would tell you to do.”

Prejudices confirmed! Devil’s-advocating against myself, I used some of what the MeFites said to build the strongest possible pro-objective argument, but that argument only comes to suggesting you maybe include an objective if you’re applying to some vast, disorderly organization (shudder) that might separate your résumé from your cover letter and forget what job you applied for in the first place — and if you don’t think you’re quite smart enough to subtly build your objective into other, less obvious bits of your résumé. Their self-disrecommending quality seems inescapable.

Backwards entrepreneurship

I must have a career (a) not dependent on the benevolence of the taxpayer but (b) where Andrei Tarkovsky nevertheless commands great importance. This may demand the strategy now known as “backwards entrepreneurship.” In interview with something called Daily Brink, Jesse Thorn, my Fearless Leader at Maximumfun.org, defined it thus:

Would you call yourself an entrepreneur?

I’m a “backwards entrepreneur.” My entrepreneurship stands from trying to find a way to eat while I do things that I like.

(Paul Graham variation: “to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.”)

Backward though it may be, only this form of entrepreneurship calls to me. No, scratch that — only this form of entrepreneurship makes sense to me. I can envision someone figuring out which business model stands the greatest chance of making money — of attracting whichever customer base seems the largest or spendiest — in the same way I can envision squaring the circle. You can think about it, but surely... surely nobody can actually do it?

Often, when I get on this jag — it happens with increasing frequency — friends wonder aloud if I’ve turned downright anti-capitalist. Nonsense! I’ve long assumed it obvious to everyone that, as far as my political sense runs, it runs only toward capitalism — possibly as far as shameless capitalism. I would live in no society but a capitalist society, not least due to capitalism’s tolerance for non-capitalists. Try living as a communist under capitalism; now try living as a capitalist under communism. See which works out better.

My capitalism takes the form of the Catholicism dear to so many members of the modern Anglosphere: deep in one of the lesser chambers of my heart of hearts, I buy it. Yet I totally lack the wherewithal to practice it with anything close to rigor and, what’s more, find the whole affair dispiritingly wanting in aesthetic taste. I’ll turn this over to (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Alain de Botton, from his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work:

It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip-service to the pursuit of higher goals. [ … ] Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. [But] it is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Gentleman of the iron highway

That bidding war over The Marketplace of Ideas keeps not starting, so I’ve been looking for public radio jobs. Something tells me the ongoing mass exodus from NPR might stiffen the competition at the other outfits, so I work extra hard on my résumé. Whenever I step back and take a good look at it, I bask in the glow of my own pure invincibility. How many of those ex-NPR hopefuls can claim experience as booker, producer, host, engineer, editor, and web manager? How many of them can claim to have interviewed Clive James, Momus, and Peter Bagge?

Yeah. Thought not.

Nevertheless, this has yet to actually work. But hope springs eternal, and I keep an eagle eye on the listings for either a public radio position relevant to my interests and where I wouldn’t have to move to someplace cold. Failing that, I can pursue a host of other jobs: raconteur, provocateur, tastemaker, enfant terrible, cultural icon. I have not, of course, ruled out a life of crime, or a life in the boxcars and on the rails — a form of a life of crime. E-mailing with a public radio insider about my prospects in the industry, I received this reply:

Learn hobo signs (soft touch here, bad dog, etc.) and how to play harmonica. You will find these skills invaluable as a gentleman of the iron highway.

Marc Maron and Tom Scharpling, making their things

Marc Maron does stand-up comedy and the podcast WTF, which, for my earbud time, has risen to become one of the best interview-y concerns going. Tom Scharpling does The Best Show on WFMU. Tom joined Marc on WTF and talked about the journey toward doing his own media thing. Resonant words:

Tom Scharpling: I was like, “I’ve got to get good at writing. I’ve got to dedicate myself to finding a job. I can’t have something like this, that’s taking me off course.” So I quit for a couple years.

Marc Maron: Quit radio?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, I quit the station.

Marc Maron: That was that juncture where it’s like, “The radio thing — I’m not even getting paid for that. I’ve got to get out of [working at a sheet music store] or I’m going to get old there...”

Tom Scharpling: Exactly; I was going to be trapped.

Marc Maron: “... and I’m going to focus.”

Tom Scharpling: “I need to start writing and just get myself out of this place in my life.”

Marc Maron: It’s a horrible place.

Tom Scharpling: Because you can feel that you might never get out of it.

Marc Maron: [strangled noise]

Tom Scharpling: There’s no guarantees. On any of this stuff.

Marc Maron: Ever!

Tom Scharpling: You know people who never get beyond a certain point, for whatever reason. It’s like, “There’s no guarantee I’m not one of those people. There’s no guarantee I didn’t hit the ceiling, whatever I’m hitting right now.”

Marc Maron: “I might be done!”

Tom Scharpling: Yeah, “This might be it for me.” But then, in your head, you think, “No, this is not it. I’m still going on a journey. I still have other places to go.” Maybe you don’t. Maybe this is the end of your line.

Marc Maron: That’s a horrible struggle, because I don’t know who you are in your mind, but in those moments — it’s almost a moment where, literally, there’s a part of your heart that’s reaching out to your parents, almost, like, “Take me to the place, mommy!” There’s this moment, like, “How do I get there?” Then you realize, “I’ve got to cry, then I’ve got to do this work.” But there’s something about that weird area where the fear of success and the fear of failure is the same thing. Like, “If I finish it, what if it stinks? And if I don’t do it, what if I’m still stuck?” That thing? You ever get that thing?

Tom Scharpling: The fear of success is not the thing for me. The feat of failure is almost all of it for me. I feel that looming.

Marc Maron: But it doesn’t stop you from doing things, which is good.

Tom Scharpling: No, exactly. I’ve always thought, you know the amount of geniuses that there are out there? There’s like five of them, maybe. It’s like, Paul Thomas Anderson, that guy is on a different plane from all of us. Then there’s, like, the bottom twenty percent, the Rupert Pupkins of the world that are just completely talentless, don’t belong...

Marc Maron: But keep going!

Tom Scharpling: They have to learn that themselves, when the cards get dealt: okay, wasn’t for me. But that middle stretch: all it is that separates the people is just how hard you work on it, and if you keep your head in the game. I was just like, “I can do okay in that mix. I know I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure I’m not Rupert Pupkin. I know I’m not a fraud.”

Marc Maron: Right. The authenticity thing’s important.

Tom Scharpling: It’s like, if I do the best I can do, that takes care of a certain amount of it. I’ve always operated with that in mind.

Marc Maron: We’re probably similar in the way of the amount of pressure we put on ourselves.

Tom Scharpling: Oh yeah. That’s part of why I quit.

Marc Maron: You hit a wall. It’s like, “What else am I going to do?” You feel like you’re spinning. You’re like, “I’ve done this. It’s not changing!”

Tom Scharpling: My thing is also, it’s a listener-supported station. There’s no way to ever monetize what I’m doing there. I’m working for the greater good of this noncommercial station, which I am completely on board with.

Marc Maron: But did that function also support, not your self-sabotaging element, but the idea that there’s something noble about it, number one, and also number two, there’s integrity built into it?

Tom Scharpling: Yeah. But you get tired at a point. I got so tired of this thing that just felt like it would never end. It felt like I had a certain amount of responsibility to the station to be earning a certain amount of money to keep the thing going, which was not really true. I do make a good amount of money when it’s the fundraiser, but the station has survived the big DJs coming and going. It’s always managed to survive. But I put an unrealistic thing on myself, thinking, “I have to be here every week.” The thing that was fun for everybody else kind of became a job for me, a job that I can only lose money on, this job that I can only lose money on — and it will never end. I just got sad.

Marc Maron: It’s like a sentence.

Tom Scharpling: Exactly.

From Put This On, Tom Scharpling’s three rules:

1. DO THE WORK. Can you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that you did the best you could?
2. BE THE BEST POSSIBLE VERSION OF YOURSELF. Don’t shortchange yourself or pull your punches because of some internal negative voice!
3. WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU NEED TO DO. It helps. Do those three things and you’ll be more alright than not.

Ira Glass on being interviewed by Marc Maron:

Being interviewed by Maron reminded me of an old axiom about interviewing: that an interview is a party you're throwing and your guest will mirror your behavior. Marc is an insanely intense guy, and stares into you as you talk — it really feels like his eyes are piercing inside you — and then when he speaks he reaches inside himself and talks in the most heartfelt way possible. In a room with that, you'd have to be made of stone not to respond in the most soulful way you can summon up. He's emotionally present and he makes you emotionally present. I don't think that's any kind of calculated move, it's who he is when he's performing. And of course it gets amazing results.

Mark Larson and Justin Wehr on cat and dog media

Comments on cat and dog media from Mark Larson:

This reminds me of an aside in Barbery's "The Elegance of the Hedgehog": "The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects". I agree 100% about being turned off by perpetually needy hard-sell dog media, but the downside of cat media: it's more difficult to socialize around. I have yet to have a water-cooler conversation turn to last night's Charlie Rose. Alas! My cultural cross to bear.

And Justin Wehr:

Can one be both a cat media person and have a 10,000 subscribership goal? I suppose so if the purpose of the goal is not “hey, look at me” but rather more like “I want to do this, but if it doesn’t feed me by this point, time to move on”.

Justin refers, of course, to my 10,000-or-bust drive for The Marketplace of Ideas. I consider his a valid question, though one basic objection rises quickly: would you really call 10,000 subscribers such a big number? To my mind, 10,000 remains safely on the segment of the media spectrum between “niche” and “very niche.” If I can’t even reach that, then I deem the world itself officially wrong: I’ll move to a fortified compound in Wyoming and start cranking out webisodes about jeggings or something.

The next logical question: do I mean The Marketplace of Ideas to be “cat media”? Readers and listeners seem to suppose so, but I can’t see my own intentions quite so clearly. My main drive tells me to make the best, most interesting conversations I probably can, but, like Peter Greenaway, I want to be MAINNNNNSTREAMMMMM. (Note for Peter Greenaway, if this ever gets back to him: my link to that Exiled piece by no means implies endorsement of that Exiled piece. And while I’m at it, note for Elvis Mitchell: my link to that New York piece by no means implies endorsement of that New York piece. Let’s straighten this out.)

Justin addressed this issue in his own post:

That is probably generally true, but it is not necessarily true, as Colin himself writes in a previous post:

I've recently come to find that making something interesting and popular is the only creative goal worth pursuing. Sure, you can gun for popularity alone, but the easiest way to that is to crank out something bland that zero love but millions find acceptable. On the coin's other side, you can make maximize only interestingness, but then you risk making something obscure that your potential audience, the pool of people with pre-existing proximity to the work — dwindles to zero.

A quote from Anne Sexton comes to mind: "I am in love with money, so don't be mistaken. But first I want to write good poems."

Posts within posts within posts: things just got vertiginous.